... and so little time. Every year in this country some 60,000 tomes are published, and Books can't get to most of them. Nonetheless, we've culled some from the herd that might be worth a look. These are not reviews – they are book alerts.

And now, for something completely different:

Toby Barlow goes out on a limb, and then some, in “Sharp Teeth” (HarperCollins, 306 pages, $22.95). After all, when was the last time you saw a blank-verse novel? About werewolves? In L.A.?

The last thing I read that even came close – in quality as well as style – was “The Golden Gate,” Vikram Seth's masterful novel written in sonnets. And that was in 1986. (OK, book hounds, there have been others since then, but I didn't read them. As Dick Cheney might put it: So?)

fact

he knows that it's impossible to tell a wolf

from a man if

he keeps his chin up

and his teeth clean

I could easily fill this column with lifts from the book; Barlow's writing is terrific, intense and intensely serious – this is in no way a gimmick book.

John Edgar Wideman might as well be writing poetry in “Fanon: A Novel” (Houghton Mifflin, 229 pages, $24). His pages-long riffs grab like Tupac backed by Miles Davis; the novel's mix of fiction, biography (real and imagined) and memoir (real and imagined) flows like free-form yet disciplined jazz.

“Fanon” the novel is a “project” by an African-American novelist named Thomas, who is writing a life of Fanon the man, the freedom fighter, the author of the seminal liberation study “The Wretched of the Earth.” Thomas has no choice in the matter, though Fanon's “story's extraordinary, it's also like mine, like anybody's, just another story but since I've chosen to tell it or it's chosen me, for reasons I'm still attempting to figure out as I proceed, reasons that may be why I proceed, I know a life's at stake. Whose life and why are other things I'm trying to figure out.”

Tobias Wolff is another fiction writer capable of spinning your head around. “Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories” (Knopf, 377 pages, $26.95) is his first collection in more than a decade: 10 new works and 21 previously published efforts (“classics” per the PR handout, and that fits at least a few of them – I haven't read all of them; see Cheney/“So” above).

One favorite, “Bullet in the Brain,” that readers of a certain section might identify with, finds Anders stuck in line at the bank in a “murderous temper.” The “book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed” finds himself in the midst of a bank heist. Laughing at one of the gunmen's choice of phrasing, Anders finds himself with said bullet in said brain.

As “the bullet came under the mediation of brain time” ... “it is worth noting what Anders did not remember”: first love, first wife, all the shards of a life shattered. But, this “is what he remembered: Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whir of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game.”

Comedian Robert Schimmel turns serious with “Cancer on $5 a Day” (Da Capo, 195 pages, $22), a memoir of the past seven years since he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It's engrossing and dark, with touches you'd expect from the rough-edged, ribald comic:

Schimmel, looking at his ex-wife's “beautiful home in a desert paradise”:

“My lawyer managed to scrap up enough of the leftover crumbs so I could afford to rent a one-bedroom rat hole on the fringe of Hollywood. Let's clear up something right now. Cancer is a shafting, but it's a cakewalk compared to divorce.”

Before I even opened the package containing “Batman: The Killing Joke” (D.C. Comics, 64 pages, $1799), one of my co-workers sent me a message:

“I just got a copy of my favorite D.C. comic of all time! It's called 'The Killing Joke.' It features the Joker on the cover and tells how Batgirl got paralyzed. ...”

It's easy to see why he was so jazzed: “The Killing Joke” is terrific, adult fun, and author Alan Moore and illustrator Brian Bolland are the perfect dark team to pen such a perfect dark story. Forget Jack Nicholson – this hardcover “deluxe edition” gives the Joker, in all his insane glory, his due.

Quickies: “Beet” (Ecco, 225 pages, $23.95) by Roger Rosenblatt – The second novel by the playwright and award-winning nonfiction author, this one a satire about a college on the brink.

Martin Zimmerman, a Union-Tribune copy editor, has been known to read a book every now and then.